Staff Pick

A compassionate look at how the medical industry currently handles aging, terminal illness, and end-of-life issues. Often medical professionals ignore quality of life, or a person's overall well-being, in favor of more treatments. There are no easy answers, but our reluctance to address these issues has not helped us to make more informed choices. Recommended By Mary Jo S., Powells.com

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

In Being Mortal, bestselling author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending.

Medicine has triumphed in modern times, transforming birth, injury, and infectious disease from harrowing to manageable. But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering.

Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his professions ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. Gawande offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to demonstrate that a person's last weeks or months may be rich and dignified.

Full of eye-opening research and riveting storytelling, Being Mortal asserts that medicine can comfort and enhance our experience even to the end, providing not only a good life but also a good end.

Review

“A deeply affecting, urgently important book — one not just about dying and the limits of medicine but about living to the last with autonomy, dignity, and joy.” Katherine Boo

Review

“We have come to medicalize aging, frailty, and death, treating them as if they were just one more clinical problem to overcome. However it is not only medicine that is needed in ones declining years but life — a life with meaning, a life as rich and full as possible under the circumstances. Being Mortal is not only wise and deeply moving, it is an essential and insightful book for our times, as one would expect from Atul Gawande, one of our finest physician writers.” Oliver Sacks

Review

“American medicine, Being Mortal reminds us, has prepared itself for life but not for death. This is Atul Gawande's most powerful — and moving — book.” Malcolm Gladwell

About the Author

Atul Gawande is author of three bestselling books: Complications, a finalist for the National Book Award; Better, selected by Amazon.com as one of the ten best books of 2007; and The Checklist Manifesto. His latest book is Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. He is also a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He has won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science, a MacArthur Fellowship, and two National Magazine Awards. In his work in public health, he is Executive Director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit organization making surgery safer globally. He and his wife have three children and live in Newton, Massachusetts.

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What Our Readers Are Saying

Average customer rating 5 (6 comments)

In this book, surgeon Atul Gawande addresses some of medicine’s most difficult questions and discusses the very topic that many people fear most: ageing, death, and dying. Through telling the stories of his patients and family members, he explores the limits of what medicine can and cannot do, but more importantly, what it should and should not do. Gawande argues that in some cases, we have taken medicine’s recent technical triumphs too far, endlessly providing additional treatment when in some cases it actually just prolongs suffering and decreases quality of life. Through a more open and honest acknowledgment of the reality of death and a careful consideration of factors important to living the most full life possible until the end, medicine may be better able to achieve its ultimate purpose: not just prolonging life, but helping us to lead the highest quality of lives we can. A sensitive and honest appraisal of the failures of himself, his colleagues, and the medical profession, this book is a must-read, especially for everyone who will at some point help to make care decisions for elderly family members.

this is a very thought provoking and insightful read. Anyone over age 55 who might be inclined to consider the joy and complexity their next 20 or more years, should read this book. The author's perspective as a medical doctor who has thought deeply about the challenges, opportunities and experiences of aging, has informed this book with experience and understanding. I found myself reading a few pages then putting the book down in order to reflect upon the impact of the seriousness of this subject matter upon my own life. I felt that I had a guide with which to review my life at 72 and beyond. This book is a marvelous opening into self-evaluation of medical issues affecting the last 20 or 30 years of life.

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande seems an incredibly relevant read at a time when health insurance and medical care are so frequently in the (American) news. The author, a medical doctor, informs readers without ever talking down to them, tells personal anecdotes without ever aggrandizing his own achievements, and draws those willing to follow these tales deep into the kind of discussions we too frequently avoid—discussions that include the surprising reminder that parents often don’t want to live and die under their children’s care.
Life ends, as the author reminds us, in spite of medicine’s best practices. Lives slow down. Abilities fade. But misery might be more of an enemy than death. The author shows how experience taught him the questions that ease life’s end. What do you expect? What do you want? What will you sacrifice? He invites us to see those questions play out in other people’s lives, including his own father’s. And he shows how well-advised thought before the end can inform well-advised decisions in times of panic.
Being Mortal is a difficult book to read, as it deals with a difficult subject. But it’s also a smooth read, uplifting in its promise that there are better ways, and hopeful in its many different depictions of care for all the elderly, not just those slated to soon die. I found myself imagining an aging future without so much dread, and pondering where I might find good places to live when the time comes around.
Disclosure: A friend loaned me the book as people we know are now in need of care.

The book is far better than a "if this, do that" instruction manual. It gets you thinking about the end of your life. Actions can then be taken to work to support whatever your aim is. If you don't have such a goal, the default answer is "more technology, more operations, more medication" and perhaps several years of misery.
It is by far the best book of this type that I've ever read.

I saw my 89 year old father die peacefully at home 2 months back. Thus it was very traumatic to read about the painful "ends of lives" and deaths that Dr. Gawande describes in his book "Being Mortal." Perhaps the most valid point that the writer makes is in the epilogue where he says, "the field of palliative care emerged over recent decades to bring this kind of thinking to the care of dying patients." "This is cause for encouragement. But it is not cause for celebration. That will be warranted only when all clinicians apply such thinking to every person they touch."

I saw my 89 year old father die peacefully at home 2 months back. Thus it was very traumatic to read about the painful "ends of lives" and deaths that Dr. Gawande describes in his book, "Being Mortal." Perhaps the most valid point that the writer makes is in the epilogue where he says, "the field of palliative care emerged over recent decades to bring this kind of thinking to the care of dying patients." "This is cause for encouragement. But it is not cause for celebration. That will be warranted only when all clinicians apply such thinking to every person they touch."